How modeling helps globally distributed teams

Are you modeling?
Today I have Nabi Zamani here in Japan (He is a member of Friends of Astah). He is from Germany to talk about modeling.
Hi Zamani. Could you introduce a bit about yourself?

Nabi

Hi Kenji.
Sure. My name is Nabi. I’m from Germany like Kenji said. I am running a small business (nabisoft GmbH – now they are hiring!) in Germany. What we do is mainly a technology consultant. So we have clients to adopt the latest technologies in different areas. Main technologies I’m working is related to current SAP topics, Java EE and typical web development. Clients invite external consultants like us to bring them new things.

Check out Nabi’s company website – Nabisoft GmbH

How modeling is used in the project

Kenji

Do you use modeling a lot in your project?

Nabi

Yes, I’ve found that modeling is a perfect tool to start communicating with people across countries, different borders, cultures, timezone and languages. Of course that helps us to have the same feeling of the system that we try to develop together. So it’s a very crucial part to model in my opinion.

Kenji

I see. So your project sometime has distributed teams?

Nabi

Yes. To give you an example last project, we’ve had teams in Germany, India and China so that was an agile project as well.
At some point, it gets hard to communicate some things and we get to lose some kind of communication.

Kenji

How do you use modeling in the context?

Nabi

I typically like using modeling for explaining how I see the current system because I can model what I think the system looks like. If there was a system and I start discussing with others about it, it suddenly turns out that either I was wrong or others have totally different understanding about the system. But by using the modeling, we can find the issues that we share and we can solve them by changing the architectures or by making sure that everybody has kind of the same understanding of the system. If you have a picture that tells you lots about the system if you don’t have an existing system. Of course it’s a good idea to model your plans for the future, your architecture and have this as a good basis for discussion.

Kenji

So you are making a “shared understanding” of the system you are working on.